Max Collins - Majic Man

I’d seen the newspaper wire photos in Pearson’s clip file: Marcel had posed with the crumpled remains of a weather balloon and its trailing radar target-aluminum foil, balsa wood, burnt rubber. Only a total chump would have mistaken this stuff for something from outer space.

“I was the fall guy,” Marcel said, grinning like a skull, “the Army Air Force major who ‘goofed,’ who mistook a weather balloon for a flying saucer. Big joke.”

Now I knew why he was talking to Pearson, intelligence officer or not; like most soldiers, Marcel would have been willing to die for his country, but it’s much harder to play the fool for it. To play the sap.

“What do you think that really was out in that pasture, Jesse?”

The eyes tightened and weren’t buggy, anymore. “It wasn’t a goddamn weather balloon, I’ll tell you that much. I was familiar with every kind of gadget we used in the Army for meteorological observations, and was in fact fairly familiar with everything in the air, at that time. Not just our own military aircraft, mind you, but other countries’, too.”

He pitched the still-burning butt of his latest Camel down the granite steps and it trailed sparks like a dying comet.

Then he said, flatly, “That was not a terrestrial object. It came to earth, but not from this earth.”

Laughter echoed gently across the Potomac.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “What was found north of Roswell, Jesse? What were you hinting at, earlier, when you said I should talk to other people?”

He was lighting up yet another Camel. “No hearsay, Nate. I told you that.”

“For Christ’s sake, Jesse, we’ve come this far. At least point me in the right direction.”

Marcel exhaled a mushroom cloud of smoke. “Well, that would be northwest, wouldn’t it? Where they say the craft itself came to rest. Where they found the four little bodies.”

And suddenly, as we sat there on the steps of the Water Gate, I was fresh out of questions.

On Monday morning at the Pentagon, as a matter of good form, James V. Forrestal attended the swearing-in ceremony of his successor, lawyer Louis Johnson-chief fund-raiser for the Truman campaign-as the new Secretary of Defense. Custom had it that the outgoing cabinet officer would then proceed to the White House for a final exchange of respects with the president, a task Forrestal-being a creature of protocol-dutifully performed.

At the White House, however, the former Defense Secretary was surprised by President Truman with an assemblage of government dignitaries, including the entire cabinet and the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. Reading from a presidential citation, Truman honored Forrestal for “meritorious and distinguished service,” pinning the Distinguished Service Medal on Forrestal’s lapel.

Flustered, Forrestal said, “This is beyond me …”

And Truman warmly clasped the deposed secretary’s shoulder and said, “You deserve it, Jim.”

God knew what Forrestal read into that remark.

After much applause, and many impromptu tributes, Forrestal did not make a thank-you speech. The papers, reporting this event, found Forrestal’s tight-lipped non-response in keeping with the innately emotional complexion of the occasion.

While Forrestal was busy getting honored (having already been fired), I spent the day with two key people in his life: his wife and his archenemy.

I met Drew Pearson at ten a.m. on the third floor of the Metropolitan Club, a venerable, subdued bastion of respectability on Connecticut Avenue. A colored waiter in a starched white coat served us eggs Benedict; the dark-paneled room was sprinkled with selected bankers and executives doing business over breakfast.

“At noon this place is jam-packed,” Pearson said, sipping a glass of orange juice. He was immaculate in a well-cut gray suit with gray-and-blue tie, the tips of his mustache waxed, sharpened. “You can’t turn around without bumping into a former Secretary of State or a top diplomat.”

“How is it that you’re a member?”

I knew an exclusive club when I saw it; this reminded me of Chicago’s Tavern Club.

“Oh I’m not,” he laughed, his smile turning his eyes to slits, as he took my dig in stride. “They draw the line at only two types of members: Negroes and journalists. But I’m on the approved permanent guest list.”

“I heard your broadcast last night,” I said, sipping my orange juice. “Thanks.”

Pearson had kept his word: no mention of Forrestal’s unstable mental condition; no mention of Forrestal at all, in fact.

“I held up my end of the bargain,” Pearson said, buttering a muffin. “What did you learn from Major Marcel?”

I told him Marcel’s story, reading from notes I’d taken after the interview. As the fantastic aspects of the tale accelerated, Pearson’s expression shifted from amused to absorbed to astonished.

“What do you make of all this?” he asked.

Our breakfast had been cleared away; we were having coffee.

“Marcel seems sincere enough,” I said, “and he did not appear to be deranged, or deluded. And he was reluctant to give me any secondhand information. All of that is a plus.”

“Do I detect, in your tone, the presence of a minus, as well?”

I nodded. “The guy’s in intelligence work, for one thing, which makes him a ripe candidate for carrying misinformation. He’s awfully high-placed to be spilling his guts like this.”

“But he has credible motivation to talk,” Pearson said. “If he’s being truthful, then his government ordered him to go along with a deception that made him look an utter fool who mistook an ordinary weather balloon for the wreckage of a flying saucer.”

“Listen to yourself, Drew. Think about your own credibility, using a term like ‘flying saucer’ in a sentence as if you take the possibility seriously. Major Marcel is a skilled intelligence officer, remember, fresh out of a war where propaganda and misinformation were common currency.”

And yet his eyes glittered with the possibilities. “But if it’s true, Nate, why … this is the biggest story since Jesus Christ …”

“What does your nose tell you?”

Pearson’s motto, famously, was: “If something smells wrong, I go to work.”

Now his eyes had hardened, studying me, deadly serious, even though his smile was wry. “You’re a professional bloodhound, Nathan. What do your olfactories tell you?”

Our waiter returned to refill our coffee cups, the rich aroma drifting up.

“I’m just not sure,” I said, stirring some sugar in. “The guy seems legitimate to me. If he were telling me a story that didn’t have all this Buck Rogers shit in it, I’d buy him wholesale. Hell, retail.”

“If the government recovered an aircraft from outer space,” Pearson said melodramatically, “it might have access to new technology that could make the atomic bomb look like a popgun.”

“Quit writing your column out loud; you’re jumping to a preposterous conclusion.”

His eyebrows climbed his chrome dome. “Am I? Suppose, as Marcel indicated, there were aliens found, as well? Do you know the implications, the ramifications? Social, political … religious?”

“Print that, why don’t you? See how seriously you’re taken, after.”

He sighed and nodded. “And, as we both know, that could well be what this is all about: discrediting me.

“The only thing you might do,” I said with a shrug, sipping my coffee, “is send me to Roswell to poke around a little. Talk to these other sources that Marcel mentioned.”

His eyes slitted again. “How much would that cost me?”

“Who cares, if it’s the biggest story of the millennium? A hundred a day and expenses.”